SATA drives may be attached to servers by tunneling the SATA protocol through a SAS fabric as defined in the serial ATA tunneling protocol (STP).
Simply tunneling the SATA protocol through the SAS protocol using STP, however, consumes a significant portion of the SAS fabric bandwidth through handshake and keep alive communications. For example, this known tunneling approach has one or more of the following drawbacks: reduces the number of devices which can communicate in parallel over the SAS fabric; reduces the speed of the SAS fabric to the maximum speed of the SATA drive; and fails to take advantage of certain performance-enhancing features in the SAS protocol.
Improvements in the transmission of SATA information are desirable.